October 9 is the anniversary of Che Guevara’s Execution in 1967. Having successfully won Cuba’s independence from the USA, he was seeking to accomplish the same in Bolivia, in the hopes that the US wouldn’t care so much about Bolivia. Unfortunately, the US was still shaken by the loss of Cuba, and took great interest in his whereabouts.

After a series of tactical and strategic errors, combined with some plain old bad luck, the CIA was alerted to his presence in Bolivia. Bolivia at the time was ruled by the brutal CIA backed dictator René Barrientos, immediately asked the US for support. They sent a special forces detachment to train the Bolivian Army, and drastically increased their own operations in Bolivia. Barrientos got to work killing miners in San Juan and Catavi.

More tactical errors and bad luck ensued. Che lost important paperwork to the CIA and lost several key personnel, including one captured alive, who talked. Che in his diary wrote:

the most important tasks are to escape and look for more propitious zones and to reestablish contacts, despite the fact that the whole apparatus is badly disjointed in La Paz, where they have also given us hard blows.

The writing was clearly on the wall. On October 8th, the Bolivian army finally caught up to him, and he was captured in the fighting. On the 9th, CIA operative Felix Rodriguez summarily executed him.

Barrientos ruled Bolivia for another year and a half, until he was finally killed in a helicopter crash. The USA still meddles in Bolivia’s politics to this day